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Coming Up on Shark Week – Tiburones: Sharks Of Cuba

Tiburones: Sharks Of Cuba airs on the Discovery Channel during Shark Week on Tuesday, July 7th, at 10 p.m.

Discovery will be airing a new documentary during Shark Week about a very large great white shark off the coast of Cuba during the 1940’s (as well as some shark research in Cuba).

A team of shark researchers head to Cuba to explore the most remote shark habitat in the world. 70 years after the largest great white ever recorded, a 23 ft. Great White named “The Cuban” was caught off the coast, a team of experts search for evidence of a population of large white sharks to prove the story is real. Description from Discovery.

Early one morning in June of 1945 six Cuban fisherman set out from Cojimar in a wooden boat to fish for their standard fare of tuna, dorado, marlin, and sharks. Little did they know what they were in for that day. They got a shark on the line. The shark El Monstruo then supposedly takes a bite out of their boat. Yadda yadda yadda, they catch El Monstruo and bring him to shore to be weighed and photographed.

Though the giant great white shark seems hardly believable, its existence has been confirmed by more than just a series of photographs. For the episode, Shark Week producers interviewed Osvaldo “Ova” Carnero, who was just a boy when the white shark was caught and witnessed El Monstruo with his own eyes.

“My brothers and my mother took me there and made me sit on the its head. It was pretty cold,” he recalled. “All the fishermen and their families came down. They were excited because they had never seen such a big animal in Cojimar.”

Read more at http://www.inquisitr.com/2203828/shark-week-takes-on-el-monstruo-legendary-21-foot-great-white-shark/#gsIHB2zs17M8TXE4.99

So uh… right… everybody is presenting this documentary as real. And it’d be great if I could believe that it was in fact real… It’s just that I’ve been burned by Discovery too many times. Discovery presented Megalodon as real, they presented Submarine as real, they presented Mermaids as real. None are though.

This “first hand” account of El Monstruo would actually fit in with Discovery’s previous tactics of using actors in “interviews” to give the appearance of legitimacy. They did it with Submarine and Megalodon, so why not here too.

There seems to be no evidence of this great white shark before now. All websites and mentions of this shark, El Monstruo, are rather dubious with almost all information coming secondhand from Discovery.

There is no Wikipedia entry for the shark El Monstruo, or a mention of this Cuban legend on Wikipedia. The images I could find are also used by Discovery in its marketing materials, I cannot tell if they’re real or not.

Alleged image of the monster shark El Monstruo. One of maybe three pictures on the internet of this shark.Another alleged image of the monster shark El Monstruo. One of maybe three pictures on the internet of this shark.

Discovery is also featuring shark research in Cuba during the same time block during Shark Week. This also would fit in with Discovery’s previous methods. They film legitimate shark researchers, then edit the film, and put it next to fake documentaries to give the more wild claims that Shark Week makes an air of legitimacy.

Also the size of El Monstruo at 21 feet long and 7,000 pounds, while more believable than Submarine, is still pretty large for a great white shark.

El Monstruo, or “The Cuban”, shark after she was caught. Honestly this shark does not look 21 feet long.

You guys will have to tell me if this shark is real or not when the show actually airs! All I can say right now is this stinks of another mockumentary or at the least a deceptive documentary!

One thought on “Coming Up on Shark Week – Tiburones: Sharks Of Cuba ”

The shark was real, was not 21′ long but more like 18.5′, and was not caught in the way the show mentioned. My father was a fisherman in Cojimar at the time. The local fishermen were catching Sixgill sharks in 100 fathoms of water on the bottom (the other sharks seen in the photos) when they started losing their catches to something huge. The locals used a small freighter with its cable winches as the line, several 55 gallon drums as buoys, and a specially forged hook using the entire fillet from a sixgill shark as bait. The set the rig on the spot where the big shark had been seen and it wasn’t long before it was caught and dragged to shore. I’ve studied the photos of this shark and compared its size to that of other great whites that were weighed. By analyzing the size of features like the fins, height of it’s back, gills, and overall length when compared to the people near it, I cam up with a size in the area of 18′-19′, and a weight of around 5,000 lbs. Still very large, and one of the world;s largest, but not the 21′, 7,000 lb monster of legend. Some of my dad’s friends are in the photos.